Ever since former U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden leaked details of the agency’s secret surveillance programs in June, we have been told that Western governments are only targeting terrorists. Since that time, we have learned that the NSA’s data-collection programs sweep up information on practically everything that happens on the Internet — most of which has nothing to do with extremism.

The one thing we haven’t learned is the extent to which Canada’s signals-intelligence agency, Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC), is involved. But that may be changing.

On Sunday, Brazil’s Globo television network reported that a leaked PowerPoint document shows that CSEC has been gathering metadata on the Brazilian mines and energy ministry’s telephone calls and emails. Whether any communications were actually intercepted is still unclear.

Both Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff and journalist Glenn Greenwald, who worked on the story, have said this appears to be a clear case of industrial espionage. Although this assertion is hard to argue with, it’s still unclear why the Canadian government would be spying on Brazil.

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Of all the resource-rich countries, Brazil would seem like one of the least likely to be targeted by Canadian spies. Speaking to the National Post this week, the former director general of CSEC, Ray Boisvert, tried to sow uncertainty in the minds of the Canadian public by suggesting that the leaked document was meant as nothing more than a training exercise: “If you look at the document, it looks like really more a case of a scenario-building exercise.”

But this is just the latest piece of evidence showing that the South American country has been targeted by the Five Eyes alliance, which includes spy agencies in Canada, the U.S., Australia, New Zealand and Britain. In August, Globo aired another report detailing how leaked documents show that the NSA was spying on Petrobras, Brazil’s state-owned oil company, as well as other government targets, including the President.

Those documents were used to train new recruits, but a security expert who looked at them concluded that, “these are not made-up situations.” Are we really supposed to believe both the NSA and CSEC use fictional scenarios about spying on Brazil in their training material?

When asked about the most recent Globo report, spokespeople for CSEC and the Defence Department both said that they don’t “comment on foreign intelligence gathering activities” and that, “under the law, this organization cannot target Canadians.”

OK. But no one asked if they are spying on Canadians, the question was whether they are spying on Brazilians. And the agency’s own watchdog tabled a report over the summer claiming that CSEC may have illegally spied on Canadians over the past year.

The NSA also says it “does not engage in economic espionage,” and that it doesn’t spy on Americans. But we know that many Americans do get caught up in its massive surveillance dragnet, and it certainly appears as though it has been spying on Brazil for economic reasons.

These agencies are in the business of keeping secrets. But their lack of transparency and refusal to be forthright with the public undermine their credibility.

When questioned about a report in Britain’s Guardian newspaper citing documents showing that CSEC has participated in numerous private meetings with Canadian energy companies, Public Safety spokesman Jean Paul Duval told Postmedia News that “it is standard practice for security agencies to discuss issues with Canadian industry in order to protect lives and sensitive infrastructure from terrorism and other threats.”

This sounds like a reasonable enough explanation — especially since CSEC and its Five Eyes partners have done such a great job of making the Internet less secure. It would be a reasonable explanation if the agency wasn’t already being accused of spying on a friendly nation for economic purposes.

The affair has left many people scratching their heads. “Now exactly what the hell is going on here?” asked the Financial Post’s Terence Corcoran on Tuesday. “The CSEC has no business mandate. It cannot report to Canadian corporations. Is the department of defence using its bureaucrats to hunt down commercial information — at a time when the world is awash in terror and other genuine security threats?” Good question.

It has been suggested that one of the reasons the U.S. government was spying on Petrobras was to gain information about an auction that was held for rights to Brazil’s Pre-Salt layer, an offshore oil reserve that contains an estimated 50 billion barrels — four times more than the country’s current proven reserves.

With yearly profits of $120-billion — higher than the gross domestic product of many countries — the company certainly has strategic knowledge of many valuable oil-and-gas plays, which would be beneficial to the United States. As an emerging energy superpower ourselves, the Canadian government would also have an interest in gaining knowledge about the Brazilian oil-and-gas industry, which the mines and energy ministry is responsible for.

At this point, any hypotheses about Ottawa’s motives are all just conjecture. But Mr. Greenwald, the journalist who received the leaked documents from Mr. Snowden, has assured Canadian media that these latest allegations about CSEC are just the tip of the iceberg.

The Harper government now has a choice to make: It can wait for more explosive allegations about our spy agency’s electronic surveillance programs to surface, or act preemptively by coming clean about what it has been doing, and proposing stronger safeguards to ensure CSEC is not violating the privacy rights of Canadian citizens or causing diplomatic incidents by spying on countries that are not our enemies.

The agency is currently building a $1.2-billion dollar glass office in our nation’s capital to house its operations. Canadians need to ensure that the agency’s operations are as open to observation as its walls, and that effective oversight mechanisms ensure it is playing by the rules.